howardd21 - Slashdot User

+ - Supercomputers Face Growing Resilience Problems-> 0

Submitted by

howardd21

on Monday November 26, 2012 @02:14PM

howardd21 writes "CIO reports that as the number of supercomputer nodes grows, so will the problem of failures. Clusters made up pf many nodes, each with their own components and Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) statistics can mean a lot of downtime and recovery.

Today's techniques for dealing with system failure may not scale very well require checkpointing, in which a running program is temporarily halted and its state is saved to disk. Should the program then crash, the system is able to restart the job from the last checkpoint. On a 100,000-node supercomputer, for example, only about 35 percent of the activity will be involved in conducting work. The rest will be taken up by checkpointing and — should a system fail — recovery operations."
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+ - French President proposes Jail for Terrorist website visitors-> 0

Submitted by

howardd21

on Friday March 23, 2012 @08:09AM

howardd21 writes "French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is only a month away from an election, argued that it was time to treat those who browse extremist websites the same way as those who consume child pornography. "Anyone who regularly consults Internet sites which promote terror or hatred or violence will be sentenced to prison," he told a campaign rally in Strasbourg, in eastern France. "Don't tell me it's not possible. What is possible for pedophiles should be possible for trainee terrorists and their supporters, too."
Is this a good move for security, or just another step towards a totalitarian society that prohibits free expression?"
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+ - Iran captured US Drobe by Hacking GPS?-> 0

Submitted by

howardd21

on Saturday December 17, 2011 @11:02AM

howardd21 writes "Reports now surface that Iran captured the US drone in early December by hacking the GPS and effectively causing it to an autopilot mode, ultimately landing it where they wanted it to. This may have been an identified problem as far back as 2003 that has never been fixed."
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+ - Obama wants to have a traceable Internet ID-> 1

Submitted by howardd21 on Saturday April 16, 2011 @06:04PM

howardd21 writes "The Obama administration said today that it's moving ahead with a plan for broad adoption of Internet IDs despite concerns about identity centralization, and hopes to fund pilot projects next year.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, seemed to veer a bit off-message--and instead of touting anonymity, she stressed the importance of aiding law enforcement.
Protecting civil liberties is important, Mikulski said. "But the first civil liberty is to be able to have a job, lead a life, and be able to buy what you want in the way we now buy it, which is through credit cards."
"We're going to support the FBI," said Mikulski, who heads the Senate subcommittee that oversees the FBI's funding. "We're going to support the growth of the FBI.""
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+ - Web browser flaw secretly bares History -> 0

Submitted by howardd21 on Sunday December 05, 2010 @06:04PM

howardd21 writes "Some websites, and companies like Interclick that provide targeted ad and intelligence to others are using a hole in browsers that provides access to a user's browsing history. It gives them an ability to target ads or adjust prices based on numerous places a visitor was previously viewing. The technique, known as "history sniffing", essentially a side-by-side comparison of Web pages you've already visited with Web pages that a particular site wants to see if you've visited, is possible with current versions of the Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers as well as older versions of Chrome and Safari. Interclick was using it on sites such as Morningstar financial and NewsMax, but did not tell their clients they were doing so."
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+ - Office Space like Theft Mechanism?-> 0

Submitted by

howardd21

on Monday July 06, 2009 @01:57PM

howardd21 writes "A former Goldman Sachs programmer named Sergey Aleynikov has been accused of stealing secret trading codes from the investment bank is being held in federal custody , pending the posting of $750,000 bail. He is accused of "theft of trade secrets" related to computer codes used for automated stock and commodities trading at an unspecified financial institution. Authorities contend that Aleynikov improperly copied a financial institution's proprietary computer code and then uploaded it to a computer server in Germany.

It is not clear if he copied "codes", or "code".

Is this a theft based on the issue of international espionage, or just a case of a guy stealing fractions of pennies from each transaction as made famous in Office Space?"
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+ - Microsoft Supports Undocumented Immigrants Plan-> 0

Submitted by

howardd21

on Wednesday April 08, 2009 @10:39PM

howardd21 writes "A PC World article reports Microsoft has sent a letter to two US Senators that are sponsoring a bill to provide opportunity for undocumented immigrants to stay in the US as long as they meet certain qualifications, and attend college or serve in the military. A Microsoft representative who sent the letter "...estimates that 65,000 undocumented students graduate from high school in the U.S. each year. The bill would allow some of them to move on to college and eventually get jobs in the country...". While recently eliminating 1,400 positions, Microsoft continues to support immigrant and foreign worker privileges such as H1B Visas."
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+ - Register.com experiencing DNS issues-> 1

Submitted by

howardd21

on Thursday April 02, 2009 @03:15PM

howardd21 writes "Register.com, the giant domain registrar has been experiencing DNS issues since last night. Various blogs and twitter traffic have been reporting issues where domains were unreachable. Register.com help desk employees have denied any problems, in spite of the reported issues from various sources. What may be as interesting as the problems Register is appearing to have, is the observation that Twitter is being used as an originating news source where others have missed this. I can also report that our clients pointed at Registrar.com are now having issues, and Registrar employees re now confirming issues."
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+ - Google marks the Internet Unsafe-> 0

Submitted by

howardd21

on Saturday January 31, 2009 @04:45PM

howardd21 writes "According to numerous sources, including the New York Times, Google marked every site listed search results as unsafe for almost an hour on Saturday. Users were greeted with a warning attached to each result, and clicking any of the links showed a page that warned users again the site was considered unsafe to visit. This included all results, even those owned by Google. After some brief finger pointing at StopBadWare.org, which generates lists of sites considered unsafe, Google accepted blame. Company representatives said the problem was caused by human error when an employee placed an errant forward slash in a site on the list, causing all to be marked unsafe."
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+ - Mozilla Labs Wants to Monitor Firefox Use-> 0

Submitted by

Howardd21

on Saturday January 24, 2009 @03:25PM

Howardd21 writes "PC World reports that Mozilla Labs wants 1% of its Firefox users to voluntarily provide information about how they use the browser, and their web browsing habits. This would be done through an add-on named "Test Pilot" that collects the information and associates it with some demographic information that the user has provided. Unlike other data collection utilities that software developers may include to provide usage information, the add-on will follow the same open source concept that Firefox adheres to, allowing the market to better understand what is being collected. Mozilla Labs stresses privacy when discussing how they will collect, store and use the data, including publishing it for other researchers to to analyze."
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